Ayn Rand: An Introduction: An Introduction

Summary

Few 20th century intellectuals have been as influential – and controversial – as the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. Her thinking still has a profound impact, particularly on those who come to it through her novels, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead – with their core messages of individualism, self-worth, and the right to live without the impositions of others. Even though ignored or scorned by some academics, traditionalists, progressives, and public intellectuals, she remains a major influence on many of the world’s leading legislators, policy advisers, economists, entrepreneurs and investors. Why does Rand’s work remain so influential? Ayn Rand: An Introduction illuminates Rand’s importance, detailing her understanding of reality and human nature, and explores the ongoing fascination with and debates about her conclusions on knowledge, morality, politics, economics, government, public issues, aesthetics and literature. The book also places these in the context of her life and times, showing how revolutionary they were, and how they have influenced and continue to impact public policy debates.

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Ayn Rand - Eamonn Butler

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The author

Eamonn Butler is Director of the Adam Smith Institute, one of the world’s leading policy think tanks. He holds degrees in economics and psychology, a PhD in philosophy, and an honorary DLitt. In the 1970s he worked in Washington for the US House of Representatives, and taught philosophy at Hillsdale College, Michigan, before returning to the UK to help found the Adam Smith Institute. A former winner of the Freedom Medal awarded by Freedom’s Foundation of Valley Forge and the UK National Free Enterprise Award, Eamonn is currently Secretary of the Mont Pelerin Society.

Eamonn is author of many books, including introductions to the pioneering economists and thinkers Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. He has also published primers on classical liberalism, public choice, Magna Carta, the Austrian School of Economics and great liberal thinkers, as well as The Condensed Wealth of Nations and The Best Book on the Market. His Foundations of a Free Society won the 2014 Fisher Prize. He is co-author of Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls, and of a series of books on IQ. He is a frequent contributor to print, broadcast and online media.

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to Carl Barney and Yaron Brook for their encouragement on this project and to Greg Salmieri and Mike Berliner for their extremely helpful criticisms on the draft.

Introduction

What this book is about

This book guides the reader through the highly original, but controversial, ideas of the Russian–American writer and thinker Ayn Rand (1905–82) – best known for her ‘Objectivist’ worldview and her novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957).

Rand’s thinking still has profound influence, particularly on those who come to it through her novels, attracted by their core messages of individualism, self-worth, and the right to live your life without others imposing on you. The hunger for this vision seems limitless. Atlas Shrugged sells almost a quarter of a million copies annually – quite remarkable for a book of 1,200 pages, published more than half a century ago – with sales of The Fountainhead not far behind. Their popularity has made Rand the top recruiter for the individualist movement. In the famous words of one libertarian activist, ‘It usually begins with Ayn Rand.’

This has made her a major influence on many of the world’s leading legislators, policy advisers, and economists. Entrepreneurs and investors too, particularly those leading the knowledge industries (such as Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and PayPal co-founder Peter ­Thiel), have been inspired by her robust account of the morality of free-market capitalism, and of the crucial role of creative minds in driving human progress.

More widely, though, Rand’s ideas remain highly controversial – or deeply unfashionable. Academics largely ignore her thoughts on art, literature, and philosophy. Traditionalists find her attacks on altruism and religion shocking. Progressives scorn her view of state intervention as a destroyer of value, spirit and life itself. Public intellectuals dismiss her as a crazy extremist whose work fuels the worst vices of greed, self-absorption, indifference, and callousness.

Such reactions should come as no surprise. Rand herself radically and intensely opposed almost every strand of mainstream thinking – on human nature, morality, politics, economics, art, literature, education, and even reality itself. Yet her positions were all part of a consistent and comprehensive view of life and the universe. It is a view that should be taken seriously, no matter how unorthodox and shocking it might seem.

Even if you disagree with Ayn Rand, she certainly makes you think.

What this book covers

This book is shorter than the 32,963-word speech by the character John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, which encapsulates Rand’s worldview. So it must focus on the essentials, avoiding academic detail. It aims only to introduce and explain Rand’s key ideas, and some of the criticisms made of them, clearly and jargon free.

The book covers Rand’s importance, her understanding of reality and human nature, and her conclusions on knowledge, morality, politics, economics, government, public issues, aesthetics, and literature. It places these in the context of her life and times, showing how revolutionary they were, and how they influenced the public policy debate and encouraged a spreading rejection of collectivism, centralism and statism.

Who this book is for

Rand’s output covered so many subjects in so many different forms – novels, articles, speeches, interviews, books, plays, movie scripts, newsletters, broadcasts – that it can be hard to know where to begin. This book organizes her thinking into a short, structured guide.

The book is written for intelligent readers who are interested in the public debate on politics, government, social institutions, capitalism, rights, liberty, and morality. It is for anyone who wants to understand the pro-freedom side of the debate and the influence that Ayn Rand had on it through her writings, as well as through her extraordinary personality and the ‘radical individualist’ movement that sprang up around her.

The book aims to explain Rand’s ideas in plain language, without distortion. Hence there are no academic-style footnotes or references – just an essential reading list of her most significant books and articles, ordered so that the reader can navigate them more easily.

It also gives high-school and college students of economics, politics, ethics, and philosophy a concise study guide to a set of radical ideas and opinions that are frequently dismissed or ignored by mainstream teachers. There is plenty in here to challenge those teachers!

There is also much of political interest. Rand was one of the main intellectual inspirations behind the rise of individualist, pro-freedom politics at the end of the twentieth century. Even today, her ideas influence policy around the globe.

Rand, the author and this book

I never knew Ayn Rand but, like many others, came to her when young, through her novels. I found The Fountainhead fresh, uplifting, and inspiring and admired its heroic vision of human creativity, achievement, and integrity. Atlas Shrugged moved me less. Its plot seemed far-fetched, its characters cardboard, its tone sermonizing, and its length wearing.

Moreover, I was never convinced by Rand’s certainty about the nature of reality and its power to reveal truths about individuals, society and morality. And like many others at the time, I was put off by the sectarianism that surrounded her, and the schisms that continued after her death.

But today such disputes are eclipsed by the accelerating global interest in Rand’s ideas, and I have returned to those ideas with an open but critical mind. I remain a skeptic, and my view of her novels is unchanged. But I hope that my personal opinions do not color what follows, and that my portrayal of Rand’s ideas (and some of the critical responses to them) is fair and (dare I say it?) objective.

How this book is structured

This book is not a chronological history but is structured around Rand’s key ideas.

It begins with the question of why Rand is important and worth reading more about. It looks at her wider effect through her novels and the challenges that she posed to mainstream thinking. It then provides a brief sketch of her life and how events shaped her ideas, and how in turn those ideas shaped the lives of her followers and the world beyond. It includes a timeline of the key events and publications of her life.

Next, the book outlines the key elements of Rand’s worldview. It then looks more closely at her ideas on those elements: reality, knowledge, morality, politics and public issues, economics, art and literature.

In its closing chapters, the book reviews Rand’s novels, providing a guide for the reader and showing how their themes, plots, characterization, and style reflect and express her worldview. It looks at some of the criticisms that have been made of her work. It ends with a short assessment of Rand’s continuing influence, a guide to further reading, and some of the key quotations that sum up her remarkably radical ideas on reality and human nature.

Why Ayn Rand is important

The importance of Rand’s fiction

It must be the most common opening of all the letters received by Rand’s publishers, not to mention the many articles and blog posts about Rand that appear daily: ‘Atlas Shrugged changed my life.’

Most people discover Rand not through her articles, but through her fiction. Her novels have brought her ideas on life, politics, and morality into popular culture and made them accessible to a lay public who might struggle to wade through some academic treatise.

Young people in particular connect easily with The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which speak to their concerns about their future lives and ambitions. The books also feed their natural rebelliousness, giving them the arguments they need to challenge the received wisdom of self-­sacrifice and soft socialism that is handed down by their teachers.

Aspiring to excel

These novels feed the self-esteem of young people – and indeed many who are not so young. They convince readers that, through thought and action, they can create a world in which their efforts will be valued, not disparaged or exploited. They assert the nobility of using your mind to reach your full potential. They make self-belief cool.

Rand’s heroes are individualists who live by their own creative talents – existing for no one else nor asking others to exist for them. They are rebels against the establishment and its ways. They do not conform to social norms but stand by their own vision and truth: a vision built on their own values and a truth built on fact and reason, not on the false authority of others. They are the creative minds who discover new knowledge, innovate, drive progress, and consequently benefit all humanity.

But minds cannot be forced to think. Creativity, and therefore human progress, depends on people being free to think and act in pursuit of their own values and on the basis of fact, not authority – a seductive idea, especially for Rand’s young readers.

A comprehensive view

Another quality that makes Rand so influential is that she provides a system – a comprehensive view of how the world and human life work. She looks far deeper and wider than mere politics or economics, tracing their roots down to culture, society, and philosophy.

This is exactly what so many young people (in particular) are looking for: a comprehensive, consistent worldview that provides a way of understanding the world and a set of principles through which its many puzzles